IDC released the latest “IDC China HCI Market Overview, 2025”. The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the overall HCI market, the standalone HCI software market, and the full-stack HCI market share.
In the 2025 HCI software rankings, SmartX ranked first with a 36% market share. This marks the 3rd year that SmartX has led the Chinese HCI software market (2023-2025). Additionally, in the full-stack HCI container management scenario, SmartX ranked second place with 21.2% market share.
With its consistently leading market performance, continuously evolving product capabilities, and large-scale production scenario validation, SmartX continues to solidify its leading position in China’s hyperconverged software market. Recently, SmartX officially released Enterprise Cloud Platform version 6.3, further upgrading its product capabilities around key dimensions such as high availability, disaster recovery, performance, and security compliance, leading the new standard for critical business support in HCI.
SmartX ECP 6.3 Leads the New Standard for Critical Business Support in HCI
The recently released SmartX ECP 6.3, with its industry-leading performance and superior business continuity assurance capabilities, combined with rich features, comprehensively supports diverse scenarios ranging from mission-critical business to data analytics and AI inference, achieving a balance between reduced TCO, improved business efficiency, and continuity assurance:
- High Availability Upgrade for Mission-Critical Businesses: Introduces cross-NIC high availability for RDMA storage networks, avoiding single points of failure in high-speed storage networks; simultaneously, virtual machine HA protection is more comprehensive, covering use cases such as SR-IOV, Hygon HCT, and vGPU, better supporting the stable operation of mission-critical businesses such as low-latency financial transactions, national cryptographic algorithm applications, and AI/VDI.
- Disaster Recovery Upgrade for Production Businesses: Pioneers virtual machine-level synchronous replication capabilities in China, providing virtual machine disaster recovery protection with RPO=0, improving disaster recovery network jitter tolerance, and reducing disaster recovery costs; simultaneously supports high availability and automatic disaster failover for the management platform, providing comprehensive disaster recovery assurance.
- Storage Performance Leap: Achieves several-fold improvements, breaking through 11million IOPS and 100GiB bandwidth, with performance comparable to high-end all-flash arrays; and introduces various performance and latency optimization technologies to provide efficient support for core databases and other scenarios.
- Security and Compliance Capabilities Upgrade: Deeply integrates AsiaInfo’s agentless antivirus solution, supports virtual machine disk encryption based on national cryptographic algorithms, and includes a built-in KMS service to simplify key lifecycle management; it also supports hot-migrating traffic encryption to better meet security and compliance requirements.
SmartX ECP 6.3 further deepens its adaptation to the domestic IT innovation ecosystem and optimizes operation, maintenance, and security, enabling hyper-converged mission-critical services to support new standards and helping users confidently cope with the stringent challenges brought by cloud transformation, domestic IT innovation upgrades, and VMware replacement.
Proven Enterprise-Grade Platform with Leading Scale and Performance
SmartX ECP is widely used in the critical production environments of over 2000 large and medium-sized customers, covering industries such as finance, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, energy, education, and government. It encompasses multiple scenarios including virtualization, VMware replacement, disaster recovery and backup, databases, containers, and AI, with a total deployment scale of over 30,000 nodes, including more than 10,000 domestic IT nodes. Production environment validation has been conducted for over 9 years, helping leading domestic and global customers achieve cloud-based infrastructure transformation.
- A major national bank: Over 1,500 nodes deployed across national data centers and all branches, serving as one of the bank’s “three clouds” and running large-scale core business systems.
- A top securities firm: Over 2,000 nodes deployed, integrating with third-party PaaS and its in-house cloud management platform to form a unified enterprise cloud foundation.
- A global new energy technology leader: Over 100 nodes, replacing VMware clusters across eight sites, integrating with existing monitoring and automation systems to build a powerful private cloud. >>Learn more
- A world-renowned electronics manufacturing service provider: Building distributed clouds across multiple global factories, supporting both virtualization and container-based production systems and development environments. >>Learn more
- A leading e-commerce group: Over 200 nodes deployed, unifying virtualization and container orchestration to support localized LLM (Large Language Model) training and AI workloads. >>Learn more
- A top-tier hospital: Over 40 nodes, replacing VMware infrastructure to consolidate systems across multiple campuses with enhanced network microsegmentation and visibility for stronger internal security.
Powering Critical Workloads Across Industries
- Finance: Serving 450+ banks, insurance, securities, and fund institutions, powering core financial business systems such as core over-the-counter (OTC) trading, corporate online banking, Transfer Agent (TA) registration, valuation, BI reporting, O32, i17, and CTP main/disaster recovery systems, as well as various production-grade databases, while supporting innovations in AI, big data, and cloud-native applications.
- Healthcare: Empowering 300+ hospitals (70% tertiary and above) to reliably operate HIS, EMR, LIS, and PACS systems with simplified management and improved availability. >>Learn more
- Manufacturing: Serving 600+ enterprises across semiconductors, new energy, and automotive sectors, enabling high-performance, flexible, and easy-to-manage IT foundations for MES, PLM, ERP, EAP, AGV, and IoT workloads. >>Learn more
- Transportation: Supporting large-scale rail, aviation, port, and logistics systems, including ticketing, maintenance, and data platforms, with full vSphere and vSAN replacement capabilities. >>Learn more
- Education & Research: Helping universities and research institutions build private clouds to power digital campuses and research infrastructure.
- Biopharma: Accelerating innovation and production with unified management for LIMS, ERP, and VDI systems across multiple sites.
Full-Stack Enterprise Cloud Platform & VMware Alternative
Built on its core distributed storage and virtualization capabilities, SmartX ECP delivers a full-stack enterprise cloud infrastructure encompassing container management, software-defined networking and security, backup and disaster recovery, and more — enabling complete replacement of VMware stacks:
- Storage: Compared with VMware vSAN, SmartX distributed storage (block & file storage) offers comparable features, optimized performance, and stability.
- Virtualization: SmartX ELF as a production-grade alternative to VMware vSphere, fully compatible with local ecosystems. >>Learn more
- Networking & Security: Everoute as an alternative to VMware NSX, offering equivalent functionality with simplified operations. >>Learn more
- Container Management: Full-featured management and orchestration services comparable to VMware Tanzu. >>Learn more
- Backup & DR: Robust data protection and disaster recovery options validated in large-scale production use cases. >>Learn more
A Unified Foundation for the Enterprise Cloud Era
By integrating full-stack HCI with VPC, self-service management, and AI platform capabilities, SmartX ECP empowers enterprises to build a unified cloud platform that supports traditional, modern, and AI applications with greater performance, scalability, and cost efficiency — significantly reducing the complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO) of private cloud deployment.
